A fruit fly’s brain, with fewer than 5,000 nerve cells, is being used to decode how any brain—including a human one—turns electrical signals into a coherent perception of the world. The problem is fundamental: we do not know how the brain breaks sensory information into pieces, encodes those pieces in the simultaneous firing of millions of neurons, then reassembles them into a single, stable picture that guides behaviour. The fruit fly’s olfactory system is structurally similar to our own but vastly simpler, making it a tractable model for tracing the entire chain from signal to behaviour. This is curiosity-driven fundamental science. There is no immediate practical application. But understanding how a small neural circuit encodes, stores, and decodes information could eventually inform artificial neural networks, brain-computer interfaces, or treatments for sensory processing disorders. Past work on simpler nervous systems—from squid axons to sea slugs—has repeatedly yielded principles that later transformed medicine and technology. This project aims to add another such principle: a mechanistic account of how a brain builds its world.
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Our brains have no direct experience of the world. Rather, our perceptions are constructed from streams of action potentials, electrical signals carried by millions of nerve cells, which together form an internal representation of the external world. How is information about the world broken into pieces and encoded in the simultaneous activities of millions of neurons? How are the pieces reassembled into a coherent picture? What are the cellular mechanisms underlying information coding, transfer, storage, and decoding? How are patterns of neural activity related to what we perceive? And how is information carried by neural ensembles read out and interpreted so as to inform behaviour? To address these issues, we perform simultaneous genetic, physiological, and behavioural experiments on a model organism, the fruit fly. Specifically, we study olfaction, the fly?s sense of smell. When navigating their environment, insects rely heavily on odors: odors elicit complex behaviours of attraction and avoidance, feeding and courtship; odors are memorized and associated with other environmental cues, in ways that reflect an animal?s unique acquired knowledge of the world. The olfactory system mediating these functions is remarkably similar in structure to that of higher organisms, including our own, but it contains many fewer cells. Our goal is to understand, in mechanistic detail, how this relatively simple neural system ? comprising not more than 5,000 nerve cells, as compared to the many millions of cells in analogous vertebrate systems ? works.
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